That's what TV says. In reality, people get tested for years after it's in remission. https://xkcd.com/931/
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35311 readers
1043 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Many TV writers are ignorant dorks. Cancer is never "cured," it's "in remission." Cells at the margin that have been excised are biopsied, which can allow doctors to say "the margins are clear." That's what my doctor said to me, looking a little wary. "Why the long face?" I asked. "I don't trust squamous cells," he replied.
How can you possibly cut perfectly between normal tissue and cancerous tissue?
As you suspected, you can't. That's why a lot of cancer removal surgeries will remove a little potentially healthy tissue along the borders (if it's not important), and err on the safe side.
There's also some situations where the cancer may be benign, and you remove the entire body part it was attached to (like removing the relevant testicle in testicular cancer), which can give a greater likelihood of getting the whole tumour, but it's not a certainty, and you would still need monitoring/treatment, just to check that there's no relapse, or surprise cancer cells popping up elsewhere.
TV probably simplifies it for plot/drama reasons. Unless it's specifically relevant to the plot, it adds unnecessary complications for the character to spend the next several years going back to the doctor for monitoring, or leaving the audience wondering whether the cancer had been removed or not.